Television on the Internet Progress Report

We haven't had TV for a month now. At our old house, we had a $65 a month satellite bill. I have my iMac in my bedroom for.com Hulu and iTunes, and we also have a Netflix Roku in the living room. Eventually I want to get a Mac mini and hook it up to the TV in the living room.

Sunny watches a lot less TV than he used to in his foster home, but he really doesn't seem to miss it. This morning I set him up to watch two episodes of Spider-Man on the iMac in my bedroom. I like this set-up because it reduces the amount of commercials he watches. Even with a DVR, I used to have to pay really close attention to edit out the commercials. There are only a few commercials on Hulu and they're geared to adults anyway.

My new favorite TV show is The Riches. It's AWESOME. I love Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver and I love the whole subterranean ethnic minority aspect of the show. The season one finale had me on the edge of my bed! I'm starting to watch Season Two on iTunes, which unfortunately I have to pay for. I have to confess, I have looked into filesharing downloads, but I don't know if I have the time to set it up in a secure way. I'm fine with paying for my favorite shows as long as I'm still paying less than with cable.

Netflix has Weeds on-demand, so we gave that a try. In the first episode, I felt like I was being assaulted. The characters kept gossiping about an Asian woman who was sleeping with someone's husband. References to her exotic sex secrets, the phrases "Oriental p*ssy" and "me love you long time"... my tolerance for racist crap is actually pretty high as long the show or movie is good, but this one wasn't. Guy kept watching a few more episodes, but I went off to make a quiche and just looked in now and then. I perked up when the Asian woman came on-screen. Maybe she'd prove everyone wrong and... and... nope, she's a slutty whore-slut who's not ashamed to be a slutty slut-whore.

The black people on the show were also made out of cardboard. The black woman is sassy! Super sassy! She calls Mary-Louise Parker "snowflake" and insults her a lot, but because the nice white lady gracefully puts up with the sassing, they all totally respect her! The black guy buys expensive rims for his hooptie on eBay... because that's what black people do! Isn't that funny!

It was clear that the white characters were allowed to have unique quirks and flaws, but everyone else just had stupid racist quirks and flaws. I really hate that. Why not have a slutty Asian MAN? Or a depressed, pill-popping, shopaholic black woman? The show would really have been much more watchable if all the characters were white. My husband gave up on it too. It's just not that entertaining.

I watched the Sons of Anarchypremiere last night and actually liked it, even though all the non-white characters were disposable -- literally disposable. It's basically a crime drama, so somehow, that doesn't bother me as much as all the crap in that inexplicably popular Weeds show.

Sunny loves the Walking with Dinosaurs and Chased by Dinosaurs specials. These are kind of a pain because he can't watch them without us, because they're too scary, but he absolutely loves them. I think they're cool too, so I don't mind watching them over and over again as long as it's for short periods. He also likes Spider-Man, Jackie Chan Adventures and Astroboy. Then there's the Scooby Doo cartoon movies. God, I hate those things. I was never a big Scooby Doo fan, but Sunny is nuts over them. He's seen Aloha Scooby Doo about ten times. His favorite phrase, as he's very fond of reminding us, is "you meddling mainlanders!"

We got him the "Happy to be Nappy" DVD which has really nice shorts focusing on respecting difference. Since it doesn't have dinosaurs, exploding robots or surfing monsters, Sunny wasn't too interested, but he did pay attention on and off and I tried to reinforce the messages.